Re: Our choice of factions and models for games

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Phil said:

I agree. Not only that, but I know of at least one starship game that
went the homogenization route, and pretty much ruined itself as a game.
IMO, of course; it's still going and presumably has a load of devoted
fans, but I gave it up when all the ships began to be almost identical
except for their shape. I much prefer it when Race/Faction A has put
their efforts into developing certain weapons and defences while R/F B
has gone another way, and half the fun of the game is dealing with the
interaction between the different technologies. Of course, the various
designs for each race do have to be more or less equivalent; one problem
I've had with FT is that the alien ships seem to be too powerful for the
humans -- but let's not start that discussion again <g>

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And yet, in some games, the technology is very similar (Attack Vector,
Honor Harrington off the same engine) and this was fairly common in
games
like Harpoon or Microarmour.

The differences in military construction and in TO&E tend to be the
result
of doctrinal differences, economics, and specifics of local terrain in
the
real world. Space tends to mostly erode the local terrain aspect.

You could still justify having fleets with a greater balance of missile
ships versus carriers (for instance) if the missile ships are cheaper
and
the polity in question can't afford the carriers as a rule. It isn't the
mystical 'we can't build them' it is 'we can't afford to build many of
them
and so go a cheaper way'.

Similary, you could justify a force that uses primarily slower ships
because their political doctrine implies static defence of their planets
rather than offensive strikes into the systems of the opposition.

So the setting in some ways is the ultimate determiner of a faction's
flavour. But rarely can a faction not field vehicles or ships of any of
the
available technologies, they just mostly choose not to.

For instance, on the groundside front:

Army A is from a democracy that is not expansionist militarily and whose
main concerns are self defense and the defense of its allies. The value
of
crew members is high and vehicles are highly survivable, giving up some
mass for extra fire fighting, point defense and internal subcomponent
armour. Mobility is somewhat secondary, but still desirable as it may
aid
survivability. To make up for having a main gun which may not be the
heaviest or furthest shooting, they make sure they have high quality
sensors and fire control so what they can range on and see, they hit. In
this case, with mobility not the highest priority, maybe tracklayers are
okay.

Now, this is a generality. But within that force, it may be necessary as
part of a defensive posture, to have a fire brigade that can respond
quickly. They may be AC or Grav and will have to sacrifice a slight
amount
of armour to be quickly mobile. They have highly mobile APCs and a fair
proportion of their infantry has mobility exoskeletons as well.

Army B is from an expansionist charismatic dictatorship. It's primary
policy and thus doctrinal goals revolve around incursions to expand
territorial holdings. They need to be fast and hard hitting, but
sustainment is less critical. They tend to have fewer logistics vehicles
than they should and a bit lighter armour and defenses, in exchange for
which they fit large, long ranged guns with good firecontrol (but not
the
best). The units are expected to be more attritional than those of Army
A,
so they are overall cheaper and the crew and vehicles tend to be less
survivable individually. The focus is on coming to the battle with lots
of
them.

The elite forces, for exploitation and gap filling if attacked, and
probably for mopping up enemy forces after some other poorer unit has
taken
the bloody bill to create a breach in an enemy line, is a group of
better
tech, more expensive grav vehicles. Still not totally concerned about
crew
survivability, more on offense, but more likely to survive (and less
likely
to be viewed as expendable) than the conventional armour.

So, there we have two examples where any army could build any
technology,
but political aims, economics, and tactical doctrine all tie into what
sort
of forces will generally be fielded.

I didn't throw in 'terrain related' design issues, because either of
these
could be operating on multiple planets, but you could with a more
constrained scope.

You can still have flavour in forces, you don't need to say 'only the
NAC
have PTs' or 'only the French use SMs' or whatever. You can simply set
it
up so that the standard builds for each faction reflect the various
higher-level considerations that drive vehicle design. But that
shouldn't
prohibit exceptions in small numbers.

T.